Life In Hell

Right now I'm reading The History Of Hell by Alice K. Turner. It's a fascinating overview of the mythology of Hell with gorgeous pictures throughout. In fact, it's striking how much detail Christians have painted into their concept of it.
Would it be fair to say they've spent more time on Hell than they have on Heaven? How else are they going to scare people straight?

I'd never heard about The Vision of Tundale, a book written by an Irish monk in the 1100's, but apparently its descriptions of Hell were so vivid and popular they not only influenced Dante but they've pretty much become the common imagery we have today.

Tundale experiences such things as "a great bird with an iron beak that eats unchaste nuns and priests and defecates them into a frozen lake where both men and women proceed to give birth to serpents." (you can see this bird sitting on its commode in the bottom right of Bosch's painting)

I'm sure if he had time that Irish monk could've added some more fun to that. How about if the newly born serpents eat the men and women, poop them out again, only to have them give birth to more serpents and so on into eternity?

Ahh, the Middle Ages were good times, no?


My favorite myth of Hell is that by the Persian mystic Hallaj who paints Satan as God's most devoted angel and who refuses to bow down to God's creation of man. Satan holds true to the commandment that he should worship none but God.
It is this dichotomy of devotion and disobedience that causes God to cast him from Heaven and into Hell where he is separated from that which he loves and suffers the last words of God eternally in his ears, "Depart."

That puts Hell in a more useful metaphorical perspective, doesn't it?









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http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics

Daily Life Soundtrack

Five things made better by listening to electronica music (Propellerheads, Crystal Method, Underworld, Chemical Brothers, etc...):

1. Watching Deal Or No Deal is much more enjoyable without the inane chatter.

2. Cleaning your bathroom* becomes a super international espionage operation.

3. Your kids' sporting events become scenes from the Matrix.

4. Wherever you are walking it's in dramatically cool slo-mo.

5. No matter where or when you're driving, you're being chased.








*The saddest cry in the Universe has got to be "Nooooooo! I dropped my iPod in the toilet!"

Just Some Cute Harmless Kittens

Seeing this reminded me of this.









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http://www.playdeadpics.com

Quote Of The Month

Beware of good intentions from people with crazy eyes.











Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.myscienceproject.org

Pretty Pill Pleading Plagues Physicians

I was reading this article (via) about Big Pharma and was struck by this: "every other advanced country except New Zealand does not permit (direct-to-consumer advertising)."
In other words, you don't see that annoying dermatophyte creature in other countries trying to convince people that they all have yellow flaky toenails.

A quick search shows that this is true. Not only do I find that interesting, but it makes the absolutely gi-normous amount of money Big Pharma spends on direct-to-consumer advertising (2.5 billion dollars) very suspect.

I think the movie Thank You For Smoking would've been more timely if it had been about Big Pharma instead of the tobacco industry. They both exist on the same level of repulsiveness.

I wonder if european countries also don't have to put up with those annoying Levitra ads with the horny woman and her scary eyes who constantly drapes herself all over her man as she joneses for his woody.









Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.leekspin.com
(I apologize in advance)

God And Monkey Sex

Via MeFi I found a hilarious response to some book that attacks "Christian Nationalism".

This cleverly sarcastic response provides "a handy easy-to-use reference guide for identifying some of the key denominations, terms, and concepts in Christianity."

Such as:


Catholics
Catholics are the New York Yankees of Christianity. They are the biggest and wealthiest team, and their owner is intensely controversial (this makes St. Francis of Assisi the Derek Jeter of Catholicism: discuss). Catholics all wear matching uniforms, and are divided into "parishes," or "squadrons," to make choosing softball teams easier. Catholics are rigidly controlled by a hidebound hierarchy that starts with priests and ends with priests' housekeepers. Catholics are not allowed to read the Bible, eat meat, or refrain from worshipping statues.


Whoever wrote this for The Medicine Box is funny. (Oh, it's this guy.)



In other news of the month, it seems that our ancestors mated with monkeys and even with tadpoles!

Sweet Zombie Jesus, is there anything Man won't boink?!








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Worldmapper

Non Plaid Pant Aging

As I was reading an article the other day about new hearing aids that are high-end and stylish, I started to wonder about this aging boomer generation and what they will carry with them into their twilight years.

I can certainly see myself still attached to my iPod at the age of 80 (hopefully I'll have it almost filled up by then!), along with all the other electronic and techno gizmos that will be around. I really can't see myself losing interest in "state-of-the-art" stuff.

Watching last night's 60 Minutes tribute to Mike Wallace, who is still sharp as a tack at the age of 88, I thought about the many expectations of boomers and how they will influence elderly culture.

The aged are more techno-savvy, willing to work past retirement, less tolerant of nursing-home limbo, and so on. Adding to all that a healthier lifestyle, the boomer aged will live much differently than previous generations.

However, when you think about the enormous number of boomers who are becoming elderly, can the system handle it? Will healthcare and support services be able to keep up, or will things like nursing-home limbo actually grow?
My guess is that aging-support industries will rapidly boom along with the population. Now's a good time to keep an eye on that and invest in such.

I also think about my father, a man who worked his ass off in the construction industry. The work was hard and took its toll. He just recently retired.
He's in his 60's and whatever he does with the last 30 or 40 years of his life, I'm sure it doesn't involve anything near sitting on a porch with hearing aids as big as bananas and waiting for the dying of the light.
Hopefully good health will bless him and he'll be able to participate in and enjoy whatever the evolution of aging culture produces.

The ride may currently be on only a few fixed tracks, but new routes will boom. Some will be full of snake-oil, so it's good that skeptics age too.

One thing that is hopeful in all this: the current American culture of out-of-sight-out-of-mind elderly will have to change. I know I'll be making a noise in this world when I get up there (naivete alert!).








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http://www.museumofbadart.org

A Cure For Religious Disease

One theme that runs in this blog is about the issue of religion and what I call the metaphorically challenged (those who do not know how to use their religion). I often explore, and deplore, religious abuse of spiritual symbols, specifically the debasement of spiritual growth by fundamentalism.

People who 'speak for God' and corrupt spiritual teachings to push their selfish political agendas, whether they be Islamic extremists or Christian fundamentalists, are cancers of society. In America, for example, Pat Robertson is a grosteque malignant tumor on our ass.

In a new book by Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, the Axial Age (a term coined by Karl Jaspers) is discussed. This was roughly a thousand-year period (800 B.C. to 200 B.C.) when most of the world's main religions were firmly established along with the adolescence of city-states.
A wonderful writer, Armstrong discusses the history and common goals of various religions in the Axial Age, and how the Golden Rule pretty much summed it all up.

It is this common teaching, found in every major religion, that has been corrupted over time to allow our world to be infected with selfish, spiritually bankrupt, and often violent religious disease.

If the Golden Rule is not cleaned off and allowed to shine and teach again, then the metaphorically challenged will kill our world with their dark metastatic ignorance.

A dose of the Golden Rule a day keeps religious cancer away.*







*How far can I take this medical metaphor?







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http://www.music-map.com

Jacking Into The Brain

Functional magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI (I have no idea why they don't capitalize the f) is the process of mapping the brain's function in real time using various markers.

The most common marker used is that of oxygenation - an area of the brain that is active will exhibit more blood activity related to oxygen replacement.

Essentially, fMRI constantly scans the brain looking for differences between resting and active states and then highlights those areas on a brain map for the patient to see in a viewfinder.
So, for instance if a patient has their finger poked with a little needle they will see that area of their brain light up.
The hypothesis is that patients will be able to control the rate and/or intensity of that firing brain area. (It's good to note that while general areas of the brain have the same function in everybody, specific areas are quite individualized, so the exact area that fires in my brain when my left pinky is smashed may not be the same in someone else.)

The benefits of fMRI seem exciting, especially in the area of pain control. Patients may be able to initiate their own placebo effect just by use of visual imagery.
Beyond that there are all sorts of uses for treating mood disorders, improving sports training, helping stress reduction, accelerating education, pure hedonistic pursuits, and so on.

The practical use of fMRI involves meshing it with virtual reality technology and creating what are essentially video games to help train brain responses.

Could this all lead to nightmares of the Lawnmower Man or the Neuromancer? And is the porn industry salivating over this?


In my profession, for some odd reason I don't think it'll do much for those "pain" patients who demand mega-doses of their favorite narcotic and who happen to be "allergic" to all others.








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http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/welcome.htm

The Ativan Chronicles

I was visited by three horsemen of the Apubaclypse this weekend. Ok, it was two horsemen and one horsewoman to be exact.


The first was a lady who I really felt for. She had gotten stinkin' drunk and decided she wanted to quit (a pretty common decision for drunks after they've already acquired and consumed a case of booze). She was an anxious sort. Her short naps of unholy snoring were interrupted by fits of panic as she would not only hit the call light but come staggering out into the hallway with her I.V. pole in tow looking for the nurse.

"Why don't you stay in bed? I heard your call light and I'm coming."
"I've been waiting twenty minutes! I need something to calm me down!"
"No, you hit the light as you were getting out of bed, and if you don't stop that you're gonna rip your I.V. out and then you won't be getting anything to calm you down for awhile."

After several doses of Vitamin A (Ativan) she stayed in bed but would still awaken every hour or two like some slobbering beast, "Gaaaaah! Nurse! Someone! Give me something....to.....calm.........meee...........*snore*..."

That was her second night.

The first night she was fairly calm with her blood alcohol level in the 500's. When you can walk and talk normally with a BAL in the 500's, then you've truly worked hard at your alcoholism.

The sad part about it was her boyfriend coming in and offering her a drink of vodka he'd poured into a 7-11 Slurpee. In a moment of bravery, she refused, they argued, and she kicked him out (with a little help from Security making themselves seen).

"Good for you," I told her that first night.
"I really want to quit," she had said.

The third night I took care of her she slept off and on and was beginning to hallucinate a bit. I hope she makes it through that hellish gauntlet of withdrawal and still wants to quit once she reaches the other side.


The second horseman was a guy who was already full in the middle of withdrawal. The Ativan was running fast and heavy - 4 milligrams every hour or two, with a little Haldol on the side.

I only had him one night. At first he was just a little restless, constantly wanting to "go" to any number of places and "do" any number of things. He was redirectable for awhile but then needed to be tied down, first with a vest and then later with arm restraints. The D.T.'s fully bloomed in the middle of the night and he began yelling and thrashing. The next day he went to Intensive Care for an Ativan drip.

And I thought I was being a pretty good Ativan drip!


The third was an old horseman of 82. He was in damned fine physical shape for an alcoholic. Perhaps he just ventured into it at a late age. He did well enough for me every night with only a posey vest and Ativan about every 6 or 8 hours.

When too restless, we'd put him in a chair out near the nursing station where he'd beg us to: 1) Not wake his father "over there" (a chair in the hallway), and 2) Let him go "out to my car for just ten seconds. I'll be right back, I promise."

Everytime I spoke to him I had some new character to play.

Old Horseman: "Did you sell all them puppies finally?"
Me: "Uh, sure. But I kept one and gave it to Martha."
Old Horseman: "Oh, the hell you say! Martha can't be trusted with dogs!"
Me: "I know that now. I'm such an idiot sometimes."
Old Horseman: "Dammit, why didn't you give that one to Frank and Elsie?"
Me: "Uh, I tried and they already had too many."
Old Horseman: "Oh bullshit! Hey, there goes your dog now! You better tie him up!"
Me: "Ok. I'll be back later. You keep swingin' at the fences."
Old Horseman: "Yup. See you later."









Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.medicalmnemonics.com

Brockovich Bull

So I'm reading a recent Skeptical Inquirer article and it mentions that Erin Brockovich bull-rushed her data about the Chromium-6 water contamination through the legal system in order to win her famous case.

Hey, that was a good movie! Is this true? Was Brockovich full of bull?

There is an interesting exchange here, funny commentary here, and good overview here.

At any rate the point of the Skeptical Inquirer article, "Public Health's Credibility Crisis", was summed up in the last sentence:
"It is time for all public health professionals to reflect upon exactly what should be the basis of our activities: lifesaving interventions, based on sound, peer-reviewed science -- or political activism and agenda-driven activities that do nothing to prevent premature disease and death."

Great, now that movie leaves a bad taste in my mouth.



**Update** 10:00am

And Irony rears its head:

Checking out a welcomed comment to this post, I was lead to Chris Mooney and PZ Myers who rake the main Brockovich critic, M. Fumento, over red-hot scientific integrity coals.
I had no idea who this dude was*, but now it seems he's a right-wing nut job with little scientific integrity. When you have Mooney and Myers on your ass, you're toast!

So now we have the problem of the Skeptical Inquirer article using bad data. Furthermore, it is using bad data to prove its argument against bad data!

Ok, Brockovich, you're almost off the hook.
Awww, who could hate those huge....uh....eyes anyway?








*All apologies for linking before checking. May the FSM forgive me.


Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.stellaawards.com

Nursing Schtick

This list has been making the rounds again, so I thought I'd post it. (I suck, I know.)


You may be a nurse if...

You think tape can fix anything.
You believe every patient needs TLC: Thorazine, Lorazepam and Compazine.
You would like to meet the inventor of the call light some night in a dark alley.
You believe not all patients are annoying, some are unconscious (and the even better ones are intubated, unconscious, and have no family).
Your sense of humor gets more warped every year.
You believe every waiting room should have a Valium salt lick.
You know the phone number to every late night delievery place by heart.
You can only tell time by the 24 hour clock.
You refer to someone in respiratory distress as a "smurf".
Almost everything can seem humorous... eventually.
When asked what color the patient's diarrhea was, you show them your shoes.
You can tell the pharmacist more about the medication than they can.
You check your caller ID on your day off to see if anyone from the hospital is trying to call and ask you to work.
You've been telling stories in a restaurant and made someone at another table throw up.
You notice that you are using more 4 letter words than you did before you started nursing.
Every time someone asks you for a pen you can find at least 4 of them on you.
You can intubate your friends at parties.
You don't get excited about blood unless it's your own.
You live by the motto "to be right is only half the battle, to convince the doctor is more difficult" (the resident is even more of a challenge).
You've basted your thanksgiving turkey with an irrigation syringe.
You've told a confused patient that your name was that of a co-worker and to holler if they need help.
Eating microwave popcorn out of a clean bedpan is perfectly normal.
Your bladder can expand to the size of a Winnebago water tank.
When checking the level of a patient's orientation you aren't sure of the answer.
You find yourself checking out other customers veins in grocery waiting lines.
You avoid unhealthy looking shoppers in the mall for fear that they will drop near you and you'll have to do CPR on your day off.
You throw a party for a co-worker and use a urinal as a lemonaid pitcher and use a bed sheet for a tablecloth.
You hate to get dressed in "real clothes" because scrubs are what you live in.
You realize lack of sleep is the only drug you need to hallucinate.
Your finger has gone places you never thought possible.
You've sworn to have "no code" tattooed on your chest.









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http://www.rockwisdom.com

Trojan Pains And Rolling Stone Blues

I've had a spot of trouble this week. My computer got inflicted with a trojan/rootkit named "taskdir" or "abwiz." I don't know how it got through, or what it does. All I know is that I wasn't allowed to search my computer or use my disc cleaner program and it kept trying to access the internet (which my firewall thankfully blocked).

God bless Symantec for offering a removal program.

Still, that's not as upsetting as seeing the 1000th issue of Rolling Stone in the stores all week and not in my mailbox, despite being a faithful SUBSCRIBER for the past 15 YEARS!!

Sheeeeesh!






Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.improveverywhere.com

Blood Sugar Shark Magik

My 7 year old was reading a book about sharks yesterday and he read aloud a list of "shark facts".
One of these said that sharks can smell a drop of blood from a mile away.

At first, that "fact" sounds pretty cool. But when you think about it for a while (a drop of blood in a cubic mile of ocean water!) you frown a bit.

Looking it up on the net, I find several sites that say it's actually 1/4 mile away (or 1 drop of blood in 1 million drops of water). That seems like a convenient statistic that has been passed around once too often. One site even says they can see their prey from a half mile away! That's either some very clear water, or they're talking sensing vibrations.

How does anyone know if a shark can 'detect' a drop of blood 1/4 mile away? Perhaps the easiest way would be to place yourself a quarter mile away from a shark, plop a drop of blood in the water and wait. It seems like the extrinsic variables would be enormous. The facts of the matter are actually quite interesting.

In the laboratory, scientists have apparently electroded (my 'new word' gift to you) sharks and tested their olfactory sense. They've found sharks' sense of smell is "comparable to detecting a golf ball in Loch Ness." I have no idea how big the Loch Ness is, and this is obviously an analogy made by some bloody Scot. The Great White's brain has 14% of its matter devoted to smell. That's gi-normous!
Humans, by the way, have a mildly impressive 5% of their genes devoted to smell, but more than half of them have mutated to uselessness after giving up to those two bastards, sight and sound.

This site also puts the 'detect a drop' scenario into a more practical light by saying, "It is more likely that the directional mechanism of scent tracking in most sharks is refreshingly simple. When a point source releases chemical compounds into the ocean, the prevailing currents establish a rapidly dissipating odor corridor. A shark's lateral line system enables it to detect subtle water movements. Therefore, when a shark's acute olfactory system detects an attractive chemical, all it needs to do is turn into the current. Sooner or later (via the shark's zig-zag movements and differential nostril detection), this will bring the shark to the source of the odor." parentheses mine
It goes on to suggest that Great White sharks sometimes poke their heads out of the water to smell the air. I have no idea how their "lateral line system" works in conjunction with this 'air sniffing'.

At any rate, all this puts things into a better perspective about how sharks can detect a drop of blood from a few football fields away. They zig zag along currents, using their highly sensitive nostrils to find the sources of odor corridors.

I'll never pee in the ocean again.








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http://monkeyfluids.blogspot.com

We Are But A Blip

I can't remember where I got this image from, but I've always loved it mucho.

Science Is One Cool Ride

Over at David Byrne's always interesting Journal he muses about Hox genes and Gaian implications.


In David Leeming's wonderful little book Myth, A Biography of Belief he explores what the Gaian idea may mean in this age of globalization and planetary consciousness.

He quotes Fred Hoyle:


Present-day developments in cosmology are coming to suggest rather insistently, that everyday conditions could not persist but for distant parts of the Universe, that all our ideas of space and geometry would become entirely invalid if the distant parts of the Universe were taken away. Our everyday experience even down to the smallest details seems to be so closely integrated to the grand-scale features of the Universe that it is well-nigh impossible to contemplate the two being separated.


Leeming then writes, "In the context of an interrelated world such as this, each of us, like the cell in an organism, contains the essence out of which the whole organism - in this case the universe, creation itself - is made."

He also writes, "(w)hat we know is that the old mythologies represented by the old patriarchal and individualistic hero masks are no longer viable as expressions of who and what we are."


Actually those "patriarchal" mythologies are more immature than that term can allow, for past mythologies are full of an adolescence of jockeying for real estate and alpha-male status. This is coming to an end and giving way (hopefully) for a more mature worldview that can see past selfish individualism and can incorporate objectiveness. In a word, the new mythology is scientific.


Leeming writes, "(w)e are either heroes of the new myth or captives of the old. Those who refuse the call, who hand on desperately to the dying gods and myths of past value systems, will continue to endanger the world with their blindness to reality. Those who answer the call will depart from the status quo and join those planetary universalists in a breaking away - as heroes have always done - from the merely individual, the merely local, so as to become truly human."

He then quotes Thomas Berry:


If humans have learned anything about the divine, the natural or the human, it is through the instruction received from the universe around us. Any human activity must be seen primarily as an activity of the universe and only secondarily as an activity of the individual. In this manner it is clear that the universe as such is the primary religious reality, the primary sacred community, the primary revelation of the divine, the primary subject of incarnation, the primary unit of redemption, the primary referent in any discussion of reality or of value. For the first time the entire human community has, in this story, a single creation or origin myth.


And the most interesting part this modern mythological story is found daily in the details.

Wait, isn't that where the Devil is also?








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http://www.dubyaspeak.com (thanks to Ben)

A Day Without Who?

Here's the thing I didn't get about the Day Without Immigrants yesterday:

A lot of legal Hispanic Americans participated in the protests along with the illegal and legal immigrants and thus didn't work, so doesn't that rather skew the whole purpose of the thing - which was to show how the U.S. economy would be effected by immigrants not working?

The whole thing was impressive nonetheless. The message was clear and I'm proud that they did it. Perhaps the overall message became more important than the economic one. It also shows how blurry the line is between "citizen" and "immigrant" in this country.







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http://www.cookingbread.com/

Futurama To Rise Again!

Here's a recent Groening interview which says there will be more Futurama.

Can I get an Amen!

The Priory Of Da Vinci Topples

I don't know whether to be saddened or gleeful over the 60 Minutes story last night which popped the Da Vinci Code/Priory of Sion balloon with one easy poke.

It's hilarious that all Ed Bradley had to do was go to a French library and check out a single document that reveals the whole thing to be a hoax. It's also funny that this hoax has been known about for quite awhile.

But what a hoax it was! So large, so complicated, so mysterious, so holy...
...and yet, it was all the scam of a embezzling priest and a clever conspiracy theorist.

In the 60 Minutes story the end expression of Henry Lincoln, the main hoax-promoting writer whose work was plagiarized by Dan Brown's Da Vinci bestseller, when he defends his research to Bradley is just priceless - give a cigar to whoever edited that piece!

I am looking forward to the Da Vinci movie and I hope it spins the yarn enjoyably, but all this hoopla and intrigue about the "facts" has been debunked so easily it's gotta be just embarrassing.







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Looney Tunes Hidden Gags